1. a) Field of the Invention PA1 2. b) Brief Description of the Prior Art
The present invention is concerned with an improvement to the structure of the play houses, also known as toy houses or doll-houses, that are used by children to play with dolls or toy figurines.
More particularly, the invention is concerned with a play house which is so devised as to be "playable" with construction toy blocks like those sold by the Applicant under the trade mark MEGA MICRO BLOCK.RTM., or those sold by other companies such as INTERLEGO A.G. and TYCO INDUSTRIES INC. under their trade marks LEGO.RTM. and TYCO.RTM., respectively.
Play houses for use by children to play with dolls or toy figurines, have been known for centuries, not to say millennia, and are still very popular.
Such play houses usually comprise a base, a plurality of lateral walls and a roof which altogether define an openable enclosure which is preferably externally shaped as a house. Usually, the enclosure is internally divided into "rooms" by means of floor member(s) and/or partition(s), each room being made and/or decorated like one of the rooms conventionally found in any "real" house, such as a living-room, a dining room, a bedroom, a kitchen, etc.
It is also of conventional practice to sell such play houses with toy furnitures to fill the rooms. These toy furnitures are usually copies, at a very reduce scale, of the pieces of furniture that can be found in a real house, such as tables, chairs, beds, cupboards, etc.
On the other hand, construction toy blocks like those sold under the above mentioned trade marks have been known for several decades and are still very popular. Such blocks which can be of different size, are used by children to construct different items according to their own imagination, eventhough models of construction are suggested by the manufacturers. The blocks which are usually parallelepipedic in shape, are provided with a plurality of identical connecting elements projecting from their top surfaces, which are sized to snugly fit and be frictionally held into cavities provided in the bottom surface of similar blocks. The connecting elements are usually in the form of cylindrical studs regularly distributed over the top surfaces of the blocks. For greater details on the structure of such blocks, reference can be made to U.S. Pat. No. 3,005,282 granted to INTERLEGO A.G.